Thanks to John S having computer problems, I couldn’t join him virtually for the annual Star Trek Holiday. So we had a brief phone conversation instead before I went out to dinner on Saturday.

Anyway, on Saturday there was a really huge crowd at Arizona Derby Dames Roller Derby. I was there with most of the folks from trivia and some more of John’s friends. There were so many people who wanted to get in that it took over half an hour for us to pick up our tickets at Will Call. I don’t think they anticipated there would be so many people there, as they apologized for the delays several times. Zach and Nathan went to get beer, but they came back and said that the line for beer was even worse than the ticket line.

They started the match around 7pm, when a ton of people were still outside. So instead of playing one bout, then another bout, they played the first half of the first bout, followed by the first half of the second bout, then the second half of the first bout. Confused? Yeah, me too, but that way everyone got to see all the teams.

It’s more interesting than I thought it’d be, actually. The main problem was that the Brutal Beauties were totally overmatched by the Schoolyard Scrappers, and the Runaway Brides were falling behind the Coffin Draggers. It’d be a lot more exciting if the teams were more evenly matched. But there’s a lot of athleticism, skill, speed, and body-checking involved in the sport, and we all cheered when the overmatched teams sent their jammer out and got a few points back. I could see myself going to another match. It’s cheap, different, fun, and the skaters mingle with the fans before and after the bouts.

I couldn’t get much in the way of good pictures from my phone, and should’ve brought my camera. Ah well.

Sunday was much quieter, since I didn’t have anything scheduled. Mostly. I got a helpdesk ticket at about 9:40am, which was odd because the problem was reported at 9:00am, and by the time I had logged in and checked it out, the problem had stopped happening. I hate those kinds of problems.

If you’ve ever wanted to see many images of a nude Barack Obama riding a unicorn, this link will lead you to the right place. It’s Seriously Weird, and also has some pictures of a rabbit with a pancake on its head.

The Plan(tm) for Saturday is to go out to dinner with a bunch of folks from trivia, then go see a Roller Derby event later. The Star Trek Holiday may not happen this weekend (maybe next Saturday, since John S appears to be having computer problems.) I may not have time to write up anything about the events of tonight, so it’s scheduled in advance.

The big excitement on Friday was that a 3rd-party provider had changed the messages they sent on the submission of an incorrect (or correct) login, without telling us. That horked up a big section of authentication code and it wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened. Well, once I knew what was going on, it was easy to fix. . . .

There’s an essay in Our Culture, What’s Left of It where Dalrymple says that a large number of men in the British prison system come in with borderline malnutrition. This is not all that surprising—heroin and cocaine kill the appetite—but the prisoners, when interviewed about what they ate, usually answer “chocolate and potato chips”. (This seems really odd to me, since Britain is home to many good and relatively cheap takeaway curry joints, but whatever.) And apparently, prisoners who received a multivitamin every day had fewer discipline problems than prisoners who received a placebo. Interesting, I guess.

This continues the St. Paddy’s Day theme, sort of. If snakes said, “Are we there yet?”, then St. Patrick would have had a great motive for getting them our of Ireland.

Thursday was actually a lot less hectic than previous days this week. There was only one minor hassle, relatively easy to fix, but it took a while. Then met Stephanie for coffee and some more work on solar power research and presentation stuff after dinner. Yay for doing something totally unrelated to my usual work, I guess.

Been reading Our Culture, What’s Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple. This is a collection of short essays where the author basically says, “This is what’s wrong with the world today, and all you gosh darn kids get off my lawn.” That’s a bit harsh, but it sums up the author’s attitude. He has some valid points—there’s a lot of stupidity in popular culture, there have to be limits to what people can do and punishments for people who exceed those limits, and the masses are not always right. However, the hostile and aggrieved tone of the essays makes it harder than it should be to focus on those valid points. If you’re spending most of your time bitching about how good it used to be and how terrible it is now, you may be viewing the past through rose-colored glasses and ignoring the good things about the present. Or something like that.

Wednesday was a lot less hectic than Tuesday, actually. The big problems we’ve had over the last few days look like they’re being caused by stuff that isn’t actually under our control, but another team’s responsibility. This is sort of good and sort of bad at the same time.

Went to the St. Patrick’s Day celebration at Fibber Magee’s in Chandler. They had blocked off the entire parking lot, and there was a beer tent, a food tent, a bunch of tables, and a stage. So a few of us (Steve, Zach, Sarah, John, Nathan, Kelli, and I) hung out for a while eating semi-traditional Irish food and talking. The place was really crowded, though. And while I was trying to talk to everyone and eat dinner, I got one call and 5 or 6 texts. The call was from John S, whom I haven’t heard from in some time. At least none of the texts were from work wanting me to fix anything. That would’ve been difficult since I had to park a long ways away and my computer was in my car.

Anyway: Long night. Maybe less stuff happening tomorrow.

Work was fairly normal on Tuesday. What wasn’t normal was the two helldesk calls I got, one while I was on the bus, one while I was at trivia. I was late for dinner because of the first call, and had to leave trivia in the middle of it because of the second call. And I couldn’t even fix the second problem because it was deeply weird and didn’t respond to the normal ways that problems like that should be able to be fixed.

So yeah. Not a good day.

The Internet is not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And these tubes can have ferrets in them.

Monday was pretty normal, though Sherry wanted to treat me to lunch because of the stupid hassles over the weekend that I had to help with. So we went out to the pizza place a couple of blocks away. It’s always nice to change things up. There’s a plan to go out to a Roller Derby event on Saturday, which could be neat. John suggested it. I had no idea he was a fan of Roller Derby. Also heard that there might be a St. Patrick’s Day thing at Fibber Magee’s in Chandler, which could be interesting. I don’t know who might be going to that though, and was trying to drum up interest.

Also also heard that Teh Nacho misses his truck (shown below) and is looking for a new one. I don’t know how you could miss a truck, though. Trucks are great at hauling cargo and off-road performance, but not good at handling, acceleration, or gas mileage. Oh well, it’s his money and time.

Saturday recap: I met Stephanie for lunch at a local Middle Eastern restaurant, which was nice.

And not too long after that, I met a bunch of people from Fark at the Native New Yorker in Ahwatukee. Nacho, Mike, Zach, Sarah, Kim (who I don’t think I’d met before) and a few other people were there. We all got food and drinks and spent a bunch of time talking about stuff. I got an “Extreme Cheeseburger”, which was tasty but I don’t know if it was really extreme. Everyone wants to know about the whole mess surrounding the Feds investigating Joe Arpaio. I didn’t know anything about that other than what I read in the paper, though. And there was a door prize consisting of a package of seaweed for making sushi at home. Sarah won it, which was actually kind of funny as she doesn’t like fish.

And, of course, right before I was about to go to bed, an important box died at work. I had to VPN in and help the on-call person fix everything, which took over half an hour. It was a little annoying to say the least.

Sunday was a lot less exciting.  Breakfast, grocery shopping, and reading took a lot of the day.

Lots happened Saturday. But the reason this entry is so short is that right as I started writing it, I noticed problems happening at work, and I had to log in and fix them, which took far too long.

Here’s a juggler performing with flaming torches at the Highland Games last week. He combined his juggling act with comedy and audience participation. I didn’t get to see all of it, but the audience seemed to like it.

Friday really wasn’t that exciting. Some hardware died around lunchtime, which caused some annoyances, but that was it. They fixed it and life continued as normal. And of course, there’s a script that’s taking forever to run for some reason, and the benchmarks I’ve done on it don’t make a whole lot of sense. I think I know how to make it work at least a bit faster, but that may have to wait until Monday.